Educação escolar e o desenvolvimento de funções mentais superiores na criança: atenção voluntária

Abstract

Based on theoretical assumptions of Lev Semenovitch Vygotsky and Alexander Romanovich Luria about the transformation of elementary mental functions on higher mental functions in the historic-genetic path of human development and the scene of symbolic internalization in the brain functioning and constitution of the complex mental activity on a child, this work seeks to identify how the school, when creates new guiding symbolic devices of behavior and thinking of a child, enhances the natural conversion of the attention in voluntary/arbitrary attention. Based on epistemological assumptions that culture provides artificial mechanisms (symbolic) that reorganize the neurophysiological processes of the central nervous system of the child, causing her to develop arbitrary, intentional and planned behaviors and that school education (sociocultural practice) has a central goal in converting reflexes and involuntary behaviors in conscious behaviors and volunteers, due to the substantial change in the relationship between brain and activity regulation in the reason of the use of symbolic devices, we try to capture, in the dialectical movement and semiotic of teaching and school learning, there are indications that allow us to infer that the mental mechanisms of natural attention (unintentional and non-volitional) are becoming/converting voluntary attention/arbitrary because of the action of symbolic systems, artificial mechanisms (signs) in the child's brain function. For this, delimited to the hypothesis of this study that these cultural encourages reorganize the cognitive processes of a child, giving rise to organized behavior, intentional, conscious, self-regulated and volitional. From an investigation on first level class of elementary education at a public state school, located in Chapecó-SC was found empirically that indeed, this hypothesis is confirmed because the evidence obtained showed that the use of signs reorganizes and complicates the thought and the child's, behavior making them regulated and volitional. This process of activity constitution mediated in the classroom showed that using artificial/cultural devices to perform schoolwork, the child develops a superior set of mental functions in coordination, among them, the voluntary attention. Conclude that school education, by providing mediators elements that should be incorporated into the intellectual activity of the child, increases their attention span, enabling it to have greater volitional control of their own mental activity. When working with complex artificial devices (cultural), the school develops a social practice that requires children to develop entirely new and complex mental processes. Therefore, it was found that voluntary attention is not of biological origin, but rather a social act culturally mediated by school education.